26 Life-Changing Cleaning Tips

Sometimes it may seem as if the cleaning never ends, and no matter how much you clean, there are still things that will always be dirty, dingy, or stained. Fear not! Your days of feeling defeated by stains and grime are at an end!

There are ways to combat even the most stubborn stains and dirt, and these are ways that will not break your back or your bank account. Additionally, to our post on bathroom cleaning, we have gathered over two dozen here, and you will be relieved to find the answers to your stain and grime problems are actually fairly easy to solve, as long as you know the tricks.

This tutorial will show you exactly how to use Pour N Restore to eliminate oil stains, and you’ll be shocked exactly how easy (and effective) it is.

Toilet Bombs

Commercial toilet bombs are pretty expensive and expose your house to a lot of questionable chemicals. But no one can deny how effective and handy toilet bombs really are. So what do you do if you want the cleaning power of toilet bombs but don’t want to pay premium prices for harmful chemicals? You make your own, of course. Here’s the recipe.

Clothing Oil Stains

So you’re making dinner, and you look down, and there is oil splattered on your shirt. Or worse, you carelessly toss a shirt with oil stains in the laundry without realizing the stain is there, only to see you’ve washed and dried the shirt and set in the offending stain. Well, you can stop tossing out oil-stained shirts. This trick will let you remove those stains completely!

Fridge

Usually, when we clean the kitchen, we think “I should clean that fridge, but I can just do it next week.” Then next week comes, and you have the same thought until that fridge is a grimy mess you really don’t want to spend all day cleaning. Lucky for you, you won’t have to if you follow these steps. Even the grimiest fridge will be clean in a fraction of the time it would normally take you.

Lint Box

It’s no secret that any dryer produces a lot of lint and that lint sticks to everything, making it clutter up trash cans and leave trails of tiny little lint pieces if you aren’t careful. You should know how to clean a dryer and make sure its kept lint-free as good as you can.

Keep your lint wrangled and close it off to the rest of the laundry room with your own little lint bin. You can make one yourself with this tutorial. You’ll be surprised how much it cuts down on dusting in the laundry room.

Stove Burners and Oven Cleaning

Stove burners are in the combat zone every time you cook. They are subject to grease and food splatter and high heat, and actual flame in fact for gas stoves. This combination makes any hope of cleaning off the grime from these burners all but nonexistent. However, if you have a gas stove, rest assured there is an easy way to clean those burners. Check out this awesome post on how to clean your oven from top to bottom.

Towels

Towels are prone to develop that mildew smell because they live in your bathroom and are often damp. You would think regularly washing would eliminate the odor, but sometimes it doesn’t. Why not? Your detergent and fabric softener can build up on your towels over time, contributing to the smell. However, there is an easy way to solve the problem. Check out how here.

Smelly Towels

Another (similar) method to rid smelly towels of that off-putting mildew smell adds baking soda to the mix. This method is a little more involved and requires two washings, but if you find the other method doesn’t rid your towels of their icky smell well enough for you, you should try this one instead. The full directions are right here.

Swiffer Pads

Swiffer dusters, sweepers, and mops are all great inventions and really get the job they were designed for done. But their refills cost almost as much as the duster or mop cost to begin with, particularly since each pad is single-use and not that many come in a pack. To save money on the Sweeper pad replacements, you can actually use a fuzzy sock. Check out this idea here.

Outdoor Furniture

Outdoor or patio furniture is just as important to clean regularly as indoor furniture. However, it may seem a little trickier since you don’t tend to clean it like you would indoor furniture. No worries, however. It is actually fairly simple to clean. This guide will show you how to do it, including how to make your own cleaning recipe for those outdoor cushions.

Carpet Stains

If mysterious (or not so mysterious) stains have formed on your carpet and the usual tricks don’t get them out, don’t despair. This trick gets out even the toughest (and oldest) of stains. You’ll need an iron, a towel, and some clear Windex. The combo of the Windex and the heat (with the towel for a buffer and a blotter) works where other methods fails. Try it yourself and see!

Pillows

Even if we wash our pillows fairly regularly (and let’s face it, most of us don’t), over time, pillows get yellow and discolored, which can be embarrassing for people to see. There is a way to wash them though that keeps them bright white and returns even the yellowest of your pillows to a white you can be proud of. Check out this how-to for detailed instructions.

Shower, Tub, and Kitchen Sink Cleaning

One of the biggest pains to clean in the bathroom is the shower and/or tub. Particularly those hard water stains that accumulate around fixtures and drains. However, even if your shower has had a hard water problem for a while, this great recipe to unclog and clean your sink will remove those stains and leave you with a sink or shower that looks professionally cleaned. Best of all, it’s all-natural

Baseboards

Admit it, unless you are a clean freak, you don’t even touch your baseboards except in very specific, very rare cases. However, baseboards get dirty like everything else, and since they are too close to the floor, and all that grime and dust from your carpet, they are more prone to getting dirty than you may think. Baseboards are also less tricky to clean than you may think. Check out these tips for proof.

Shoes

You can actually use dryer sheets to help clean your shoes. If you find your shoes smell less than fresh after you wear them, add a dryer sheet to your cleaning routine. The sheet will actually get rid of some of the worse odors, and one sheet is far less expensive than the odor repellent specifically designed for shoes.

Window Blinds

Windows blinds are awkward to clean and end up taking more time than that amount of space has any right to. It’s just extremely difficult to quickly clean between those blinds and then you have to wipe down both the top and the bottom of each blind. However, with this method, you can easily get between blinds and do the top and bottom at the same time, saving yourself tons of time!

Blinds Take Two

If you don’t feel like wrapping tongs in microfiber towels, or you don’t have all the items to make that trick work, you can also use an old sock on your hand to make cleaning easier. It won’t be quite as quick as the tongs trick, but it will allow for more versatility and eliminates most of the problems with cleaning blinds. To see what you should use with the sock, check here.

Water Stains on Wood

Wood furniture is beautiful. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of maintenance, and it is easy to ruin its beauty.

A careless glass left on a wood table without a coaster can create water stains you may think will never come out. And alas, the smallest blemish on wood totally ruins its appearance. Luckily, there is an easy way to remove water stains from wood. All you need is a white toothpaste.

Front Loading Washing Machines

Although it spends most of its time with soap and water in it, the washing machine itself can get very dirty surprisingly quickly. After all, all that dirt and grime from your clothes gets flushed away somewhere and can build up in the washing machine where you can’t immediately see it. To keep that machine clean, here’s a tutorial.

Top Loading Washing Machine

Top loading washing machines are just as important to clean as the front loaders. However, they should be cleaned a bit differently. Don’t worry, it isn’t any more difficult. Check out this tutorial on how to clean that top loader, and rest assured that your clothes will actually come out of the washer clean each time you wash them.

Dryer

Don’t think your washing machine is the only thing that needs to be clean in the laundry room. Your dryer also needs regular cleaning, not only to keep those freshly washed clothes clean, but also because a dirty dryer doesn’t dry things as effectively, and if lint has built up enough, it can even cause fires. Here’s how to keep that dryer clean and safe.

Mattress

Mattresses can be pretty tricky to clean since even if you could fit them in the washer (and that’s never going to happen), you don’t actually want to get them wet because drying them out completely without developing mold or mildew inside is incredibly difficult. Luckily, you can actually keep that mattress clean without getting it soaked. Here’s an in-depth guide on how to get rid of urine smell and stains from your mattress or from the carpet.

Microfiber Couch

Microfiber is very popular in couches, but not so popular to clean. Get water on a microfiber couch and you have obvious water stains, so cleaning with a traditional method is out. Yet you have to clean it because stains love to fasten to microfiber couches. Don’t worry. Before you lament your decision to ever buy the couch at all, check out this microfiber couch cleaning tutorial for how to clean it.

Scratched Dishes

Over time, even the best-made dishes will become scratched from use. Utensils take their wear and tear, and after a while, dishes look like they’ve been through a war zone. White dishes particularly suffer this fate. But don’t think you have to toss out your favorite dishes just because they are scratched. This awesome tutorial will show you how to repair those scratches in no time.

Stainless Steel

If you have stainless steel sinks in your kitchen (and you probably do), you know how hard it is to get them shiny after you have used them for a while. Even cleaning them with soap and water or a commercial cleaner may leave them clean, but it also generally leaves them fairly dull. This all-natural cleaning method will both clean and shine those sinks with ease!

Exterior

With all the focus on cleaning the inside of the house, sometimes people forget that outside needs to be cleaned too. Not just the windows, but the vinyl siding and any exposed elements. The exterior of your house is subject to lots of dirt, grime, and debris. It only makes sense to clean it periodically. This guide will show you exactly how to get that exterior as sparkling as the interior.

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